Friday, 22 April 2016

Drought and entitlements
... A different, and more passionately direct, indictment of a callous government is contained in the tract titled Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, by that great Indian nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917): Professor of Mathematics in Elphinstone College, Bombay; Professor of Gujarati in University College, London; Founder-Member-President of the Indian National Congress; and the first British Indian Member of Parliament. The book, published in 1901, carries, among other things, a first (and brilliant) attempt at defining a poverty line for India, and seeks an explanation of the poverty of the country in the continuous and oppressive draining of its wealth, achieved by ‘plunder, not trade’, that is, through punitive taxation unredeemed by British exports into India. It is worth noting that Naoroji had anticipated Sen’s ‘entitlement theory’ of famines, as borne out by this record of a speech addressed by him in Kennington, London, in 1900: “It might be asked were not the famines due to droughts? His answer was in the negative. India was able to grow any quantity of food. Her resources in that respect were inexhaustible, and when famines had occurred in the past before she was subjected to the continual drain of her wealth the population were able to withstand them because they had stores of grain upon which they could fall back. But nowadays they were unable to accumulate such stores. Immediately the grain was grown it had to be sold in order to provide the taxation of the country, and the people were therefore not in a position to cope with famine… [T]he difficulty of India was that the Natives had no money with which to buy food should their crops fail, and hence it was that these disastrous famines arose.” ...